AI for Good: The Complete Guide to Using Artificial Intelligence as a Force for Positive Change — In Your Community, Your Organization, and the World Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how the world's most important work gets done — and it is already causing documented harm to the very communities that work exists to serve. Most books about AI pick a side: uncritical celebration or blanket rejection. This book refuses both. AI for Good is the most complete, honest, and practically useful guide available for nonprofit professionals, educators, healthcare and public health workers, environmental advocates, humanitarian workers, community organizers, social entrepreneurs, policy researchers, philanthropists, students, and anyone who wants to use AI to make a genuine, lasting difference — without pretending away its real risks. Across fifteen comprehensive chapters, Claire A. Preston delivers real tools, real workflows, and real prompts you can use tomorrow — grant narratives, patient education materials, climate communications, humanitarian coordination documents, organizing campaigns, and policy briefs — built around the specific ethical stakes of social sector work. Learn exactly which AI tools to use for which purposes, how to access free and nonprofit-discounted plans across every major platform, and how to build workflows that hold up under real scrutiny. You'll also get an unflinching account of AI's documented harms: algorithmic bias in healthcare, hiring, and criminal justice; surveillance technology turned against social movements; life-threatening data privacy stakes for refugees and survivors; AI's real environmental cost; and the global inequities in who builds this technology and who bears its risks. Every practical chapter is built on a rigorous seven-principle ethical framework — justice, privacy, transparency, community agency, environmental responsibility, accountability, and epistemic humility — so ethics is never an afterthought, but the foundation everything else is built on. Inside, you'll find: • Complete sector-specific guides for nonprofit operations, education, healthcare, environmental work, humanitarian response, social justice organizing, and policy research • A full organizational AI ethics policy template you can adapt immediately • Honest guidance on data privacy for vulnerable populations, including refugees, survivors, children, and undocumented immigrants • A complete framework for building organizational AI capacity, governance, and community-centered practice • A dedicated chapter on global AI justice and centering Global South leadership • The Complete AI for Good Prompt Library: 500+ categorized, ready-to-use prompts with ethical guidance built into every entry • Four detailed appendices, including a tool reference guide and glossary of essential terms This book insists throughout that the communities AI for good work exists to serve are not passive recipients of well-intentioned technology — they are agents with the right to a genuine voice in every decision that affects them. Whether you're just beginning to explore what AI might mean for your work or already navigating these questions in a resource-constrained organization, this book meets you where you are and equips you — practically and ethically — to use AI as what it can genuinely be: not a savior technology, but a powerful tool, used well, in service of a more just and humane world.
